The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition (VSKhV) aimed to transformMoscowinto a “city of multiple capitals.” While the pavilions’ architecture met the socialist realism’s requirements of “national in style and socialist in form”, this perimeter soon became a site of cultural exchange and consumption opened to all soviet citizens. The same architectural design, however, was exported into the Eastern European countries. Dwelling upon Victor Tupitsyn’s statement that socialist realism cannot perform the same function in a different ideological context, this paper will investigate the role of the 1950s public buildings within the Romanian urban space by analyzing to what extent such buildings, despite …

The public space, generated by historical mutilated façades that have lost their initial meaning and message, is no longer meant to be a transparent space with an innocent outline2 but a transformed illusion of space, a confusing pattern that repeats itself from one frame to the next. Analyzing both artistic and symbolic characteristics of the eclectic façades the paper will read the dialogue generated by composition rules and recurrent patterns in their ‘text’ and ‘sub-text’, and will identify the connection between original material substance and the morphology of the architectural image ofBucharesttoday, while questioning the cultural value of a space …

Because of the last decades of informatization and hyperlinking of physical and virtual spaces few people are able to further read the classical space. Its linear construction, addressed to the “discoverer” of space, no longer suits the contemporary informational “nomad.” Therefore, space is re-written in order to recombine, in a post-modern approach, cultural information and changing identities. In a global environment where every piece of information, from weather reports to explosive “recipes” is available at a glance, it seems that the grammar of both text and space matters less and less, all in favor of a compressed eclectic status permanently …